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Shareholders of Gray Media, Inc. (NYSE:GTN) will be pleased this week, given that the stock price is up 14% to US$4.23 following its latest quarterly results. Revenues of US$782m arrived in line with expectations, although statutory losses per share were US$0.23, an impressive 53% smaller than what broker models predicted. This is an important time for investors, as they can track a company's performance in its report, look at what experts are forecasting for next year, and see if there has been any change to expectations for the business. We thought readers would find it interesting to see the analysts latest (statutory) post-earnings forecasts for next year.
Taking into account the latest results, the six analysts covering Gray Media provided consensus estimates of US$3.20b revenue in 2025, which would reflect a definite 11% decline over the past 12 months. Earnings are expected to tip over into lossmaking territory, with the analysts forecasting statutory losses of -US$0.84 per share in 2025. Before this earnings announcement, the analysts had been modelling revenues of US$3.19b and losses of US$0.68 per share in 2025. So it's pretty clear the analysts have mixed opinions on Gray Media even after this update; although they reconfirmed their revenue numbers, it came at the cost of a massive increase in per-share losses.
View our latest analysis for Gray Media
The consensus price target held steady at US$5.20, seemingly implying that the higher forecast losses are not expected to have a long term impact on the company's valuation. There's another way to think about price targets though, and that's to look at the range of price targets put forward by analysts, because a wide range of estimates could suggest a diverse view on possible outcomes for the business. The most optimistic Gray Media analyst has a price target of US$7.00 per share, while the most pessimistic values it at US$2.00. Note the wide gap in analyst price targets? This implies to us that there is a fairly broad range of possible scenarios for the underlying business.
Taking a look at the bigger picture now, one of the ways we can understand these forecasts is to see how they compare to both past performance and industry growth estimates. We would highlight that revenue is expected to reverse, with a forecast 15% annualised decline to the end of 2025. That is a notable change from historical growth of 11% over the last five years. By contrast, our data suggests that other companies (with analyst coverage) in the same industry are forecast to see their revenue grow 2.7% annually for the foreseeable future. So although its revenues are forecast to shrink, this cloud does not come with a silver lining - Gray Media is expected to lag the wider industry.